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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 358 posts.
I’ve been a NetBSD developer for three years and it’s been my primary operating system for a long time too - on everything: routers, laptops, Raspberry Pis, PowerPC mac minis, Vortex86 embedded boards, and servers.
Thomas Claiburn's FYI: Today's computer chips are so advanced, they are more 'mercurial' than precise – and here's the proof discusses two ...
In the course of trying to figure out how to smoothly zoom timelines of a billion trace events, I figured out a cool tree structure that I can’t find elsewhere online, which it turned out two of my friends have independently derived after not finding anything on their own searches. It’s a way of implementing an index…
Management of kernel extensions has changed significantly in Big Sur and later. This overview for users contrasts kexts with user-level extensions which are replacing them.
I needed to list all files in a directory, but ls , find , and os.listdir all hung. This is my story.
Now that I have your attention. I've been mulling TenFourFox's future for awhile now in light of certain feature needs that are far bigger ...
There has recently been some renewed discussion on Twitter about the limitation that the macOS sandbox places on the number of open files an app can access at once. Apps are still running into problems because of this limitation, and there is not a lot of technical detail available on it outside of Apple, so I’d like…
This is the story of how all non-admin users can read the registry — and so elevate privileges and access sensitive credential information…
The papers over the next few weeks will be from (or related to) research from VLDB 2021 - on the horizon is one of my favorite systems conferences SOSP . As always, feel free to reach out on Twitter with feedback or suggestions about papers to read! These paper reviews can be delivered weekly to your inbox , or you…
My PalmOS port is making progress on a desktop computer, with keyboard, mouse and a 1920×1080 monitor for display. While that was interesting, I wanted to try a different form factor, one tha…
Here’s a sentence I find myself saying several times a week: …or we could just box it. There’s two remarkable things about this sentence. The first, is that the advice is very rarely heeded, and in...
For many mobile users, files are like dinosaurs, a holdover from the bygone desktop era. Sure, they “work” but, they’re mostly there because, you know, ancient history. I’ve discussed this issue for the last 2 years and I usually get some version of “get over it grandpa”.
Since I work a lot with clustered VMs , I’ve ended up spending a lot of time trying to figure out how DNS lookups work. I applied ‘fixes’ to my problems from StackOverflow without really understanding why they work (or don’t work) for some time.
On the whole, LLVM has a well-designed intermediate representation (IR), which is specified in the language reference . However, there are a number of areas where design mistakes have been made. And while the LLVM project is generally open to addressing such issues, mistakes in core IR design tend to be firmly…
On this blog, I write about the various computers I use and about the operating systems I use on them. Apart from Windows 7, which is relatively modern, these include Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard, which at this point is quite old, and Mac OS 9, which is practically ancient. I’d like to talk a bit about why I use such old…
As was pointed out to us stable kernel maintainers last week, the overflow of the .y release number was going to happen soon, and our proposed …
Because it’s a real mess to reinstall Big Sur!
Disclaimer: I used to work for Materialize which is one of the systems being compared in this post.
This article has now been extensively corrected and modified.
The year is 1983, and several Apple employees visit Brown University, and get some idea of what Universities want in a computer for the coming future. The big buzz of the era was the so called 3M machine:
Introducing a series of articles on building a custom Linux installation for the Raspberry Pi, for appliance applications.
So, I was recently inspired by a coworker’s design to pack what would have been JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) data into a bunch of bit fields in an array of 64-bit elements. Binary arithmetic, bit-packing, and high performance are fun for me, so I thought of some ways to improve it, for learning purposes. Then I…
A few months ago I got a report from a service owner that their service was crashing when trying to access certain files stored in tmpfs. This service provid...
This week’s paper won the distinguished presentation award at HotOS 2021, and discusses the potential for future innovation in the tool that many use every day - the shell! A previous submission of this paper on Hacker News elicited a number of strong reactions. One reaction was the assertion that there are in fact…
I recently learned of csvquote , a tool that encodes troublesome CSV characters such that unix tools can correctly process them. It reverses the encoding at the end of the pipeline, recovering the original input. The original implementation handles CSV quotes using the straightforward, naive method. However, there’s a…
My talk should be on in about an hour and a half from when I post this. A possible next evolutionary step for computers is persistent memory: large capacity non-volatile main memory. With a few terabytes of nonvolatile RAM, who needs an SSD any more? I will sketch out a proposal for how to…
